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the standard by which women must be judged.6 To the extent that Woman is no different from Man, she avails herself to what Man possesses by virtue of being male. This portrays the solution to gender inequality as “some form of androgyny”.7 To insist on formal equality is to thus force women to be judged by values of masculinity.8 For example, the old defence of provocation in England presented itself as formally neutral, providing a defence to the crime of murder to any person who proved that they had lost self-control suddenly. A review of court statistics reveal that men who commit domestic homicide do so out of jealousy or rage, whilst women do so out of fear and despair.9 The result under the old law was that battered women trapped in abusive relationships who had killed their husbands following the loss of self-control in a slow-burn reaction pent up over a long period of time were unable to avail themselves to the defence. The law on provocation, designed with men’s conduct in mind but phrased in gender neutral terms, protects women only insofar as they conform to male behaviour.10 In recognition of the gender inequality perpetuated by the defence,11 it was repealed in 2009 and replaced with a new defence of the “loss of self-control”.12 Radical feminism thus forces us to confront the hypocrisy of a society which cries foul at the inequality of sexes but paradoxically chooses to institute equality from the male referent. 6 Smart, supra n4, 773 7 Id. 8 Id. 9 Jenny Morgan, Provocation Law and Facts: Dead Women Tell No Tales, Tales Are Told About Them (1997) 21 Melb. U. L. Rev. 237, 256 10 Caroline Forell, Gender Equality, Social Values and Provocation Law in the United States, Canada and Australia (2006) Am. UJ Gender Soc. Pol’y & L. 27, 35 11 Law Commission, Murder, Manslaughter and Infanticide (2006) Law Commission Report No. 304 12 Coroners and Justice Act 2009, s 54
Despite these compelling arguments, radical feminism is crippled by criticisms by multiracial feminism that it is “essentialist”.13 Just as liberal feminism makes the mistake that men and women, as members of the human race, are homogeneous, radical feminism makes the mistake that all women, as members of the same sex and gender, are homogeneous. There is a challenge, in other words, in “acknowledging diversity among women while claiming women’s unity in experiences of oppression and sexism”.14 In truth, the radical feminist’s crusade for equality is the crusade for one type of Woman – the most ascendant and visible one. In Singapore, She is heterosexual, at least upper-middle class, and almost indubitably Chinese. Women, however, do not experience patriarchy in a unitary way. Hegemonic feminism, constructed around the lives of one type of Woman must thus be rejected, and intersections of dominance acknowledged. Differences in the “structuring forces” of race, class and heterosexuality are not additive; conversely, they interact to produce a variant of distinct “social locations” for each subject.15 Similarly, the patriarchy does not necessarily serve interests of all men as a “unitary category”.16 The appropriate conception, therefore, as Smart put forth, is not that the law is sexist, or that the law is male; rather, the law is gendered – with room in which race, sexuality, class, age and other axes of discrimination may act.17 II. THE LIBERAL STATE: THE MYTH OF EQUALITY ‘Liberalism’ in this essay is used narrowly, referring specifically 13 Amanda Burgess-Procter, Intersections of Race, Class, Gender, and Crime: Future Directions for Feminist Criminology (2006) Feminist Criminology 1(1) 27 14 Daly and Chesney- Lind, Feminism and Criminology (1988) 5 Justice Quarterly 497, 502 15 Burgess-Procter, supra n9, 36 16 Smart, supra n4, 773 17 Smart, supra n4, 774
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